If you live in a Nerdy Neighborhood, you might want to check out the newest web service that’s making a buzz. It’s called “Nextdoor,” and it’s a social network for neighborhoods. Users can advertise garage sales, post community messages, and connect with others in their area. It’s been described as a “Craigslist and LinkedIn hybrid.”
Not too quick to post your home address online? You should be – identity
theft is a growing problem. Fortunately, Nextdoor requires address verification, which means that everyone in a Nextdoor neighborhood must enter a PIN sent to their home address. Users outside of a neighborhood have no access to the groups within a neighborhood. As the CEO, Nirav Tolia, told Mashable, it’s “about problem-solving.”
The service also partners with local authorities, which means that neighborhoods can receive emergency alerts relevant to their neighborhood.
Nextdoor has a list of more than 18,000 neighborhoods on the site, and about 75 are added to the list everyday. If you can’t find your neighborhood on the site you are encouraged to put in a request. Once there are enough people interested in a neighborhood, the group is created and the interested users are sent postcards with PINs. However, the group’s status is contingent on enough users joining within a set time. Nextdoor gives a time period for users to invite a certain number of their neighbors to the service – if not enough people join, the neighborhood is removed from Nextdoor. As people join, the trial period is extended until the group finally becomes permanent.
Nextdoor has an iPhone app as well as a recently-released Android app, which allows users to quickly see group posts and messages relevant to their neighborhood.
For now, Nextdoor is only available in the United States, although they plan on expanding into Canada later in 2013 and other countries the following year.
